My _Guardian_ column on Security by Obscurity = Ignorance is Strength

Is research that uncovers flaws in transportation
fare payment systems so dangerous as to justify censorship?

This is my reaction to the
MBTA v. Anderson case, where three MIT students and MIT have been sued over
their research showing security weaknesses in the MBTA subway fare system.
I'm hoping my comparison of "security by obscurity" to the Orwellian
slogan of "Ignorance is Strength" catches on. Happily, that comparison
managed to make it into the title.

Blog bonus: My original draft had a paragraph "Some naive
commentators have a ludicrous idea that there's teams of
civil-libertarian lawyers on alert who scan the skies for the
EFF-signal and then leap into the EFF-mobile to do battle. The reality
may be heroic in its own way, but resembles battlefield triage far
more than a bloodless inevitable triumph of good over evil."

But that either got cut for space or because the Batman references
were too obscure.

Wikipedia the nonprofit as PR for Wikia the commercial ad-farm

Another day, another gem of how Wikipedia is used to promote the digital-sharecropping of Wikia, this time from a sports site
ESPN interview:

[ESPN] What are some of the current trends along the Wikipedia online collaboration model, especially in sports?

[JW] People are taking some of the core ideas of Wikipedia and starting to move "beyond the encyclopedia". For example, at the Wikia site Armchair GM, sports fan use a variation of the original wiki software that runs Wikipedia to manage discussions about sports.

[ESPN] Where do you think Wikipedia fits in the broader framework of what's happening in society now with user-driven content?

[JW] I think Wikipedia was just the leading edge of a much broader trend. At Wikia, we are seeing people build out all kinds of collaborative works... "the rest of the library." The biggest category is gaming sites, unbelievably in-depth and accurate how-to manuals for every possible game. More than 70,000 articles about the World of Warcraft. And of course fan sites for tons of different teams, sports, etc.

Note the pattern in those responses (Wikipedia ... Wikia) - how
they "bridge" from
Wikipedia, the nonprofit project
to Wikia, the commercial $14million venture-capital
funded business with an intrinsic motivation of making investors rich (though
profitability is a problem). That is, Wikipedia is presented
as some sort of prototype or proof-of-concept for a system where a few
digital-sharecropping site owners rake in big bucks from massive unpaid labor.
And remember, for anyone tempted to do the tactic of rebuttal via personal
attack, I'm not the one who wrote about
"World of Wiki: Potential Advertising Goldmine" or the plan to
"commercialize the hell out of it".

Wikipedia researcher about being right losing to persistence and arguing

Ed Chi of the Palo Alto Research Center is the creator of
WikiDashboard, a social dynamic analysis tool created independently of
the foundation that allows readers to analyze all of the edits made by
their peers. In October, Chi discovered a huge drop-off in the number
of edits, to the point that 1 percent of editors were editing 50
percent of the content. While Wikipedia remains strong in page views
and overall ranking, Chi said the waning interest among editors does
not bode well for the site or community.

"The edits have leveled off and remained steady," Chi said. "We don't
yet know a reason for the decline, but we suspect it is due not to the
wisdom of crowds but to the increased level of conflict among
community members. Often it is not the one with the right answer who
has their say, but the one who sticks around the longest and is best
able to argue his case."

When one cuts through all the hype, Wikipedia is not very hard to
understand. As I say, it's a cult, and the people who win in that sort
of system are the people who best play clique-status games. There's
sadly too many prominent people who know better, or should know better,
who have peddled a mystification so as to profit from that.

Jason Calacanis vs. The "Google Killer" Story

For example, when launching and running Mahalo, everyone wants me to
say we're a Google killer. When that question comes up I immediately
say "let me be very, very clear -- and please don't misrepresent me in
your story -- that Google is a partner and we don't see ourselves as a
replacement for Google but rather a complement for
the following reasons." ...

Your job as a suspect/subject is to say things concisely and with few words: "Google is our partner in five areas already: search advertising, analytics, YouTube, open social and custom search. They also send us half our traffic--they are NOT our competition, they are our partner." Silence. More silence. If the journalist is good they will say something like, "but certainly on some level you compete?" and you respond "No, we don't."

Of course, the incentives are different for Mahalo than Wikia
Search. Mahalo really is a partner with Google. While
Wikia Search, well, it seems absurd to say it could replace Google, more
like a roach trying to eat a scrap from Google's meals (competitor only
in the most abstract and technical sense).

Follow-up on The Problem With Wikia Search

When I said "I'm not worthy", it looks like someone took me at my
word :-). Last week I noted an example of one of
Wikia Search's problems, in that a pure equal-weight popularity voting system tends to generate
buzzy results - giving one of my own blog posts as an example. Someone
seemed to have taken exception, and then voted that post down in the
search results, among others. I think someone else voted it back up a
little later (just what's been missing from search engines, right,
edit-wars).

But I'd say there's actually been a notably small amount of
participation in the Wikia search engine. It gets an enormous amount
of PR, which is a functional subsidy that other search engine
start-ups can only envy. But so far, not a huge amount of free labor.

"World of Wiki: Potential Advertising Goldmine"

[Jimmy Wales] gives the example of [Wikia]'s World of Warcraft
community. Yes, WOW, the role playing online game (RPG) with some 8
million customers. "It's just a huge phenomenon. By our estimate,
about 4 million people a month visit the World of Warcraft [site on
Wikia]. The community comes to us, they write about the game, they
talk about the game, they document everything -- it's a really really
in depth content," Wales says. ...

"For advertisers this is a really targeted demographic ... you know
exactly who they are, you know they are gamers and they spend time, a
lot of time playing online multiplayer games. If you want to reach a
certain demographic this is a great place to do it -- if you don't,
then don't waste your money and so that actually works really well for
advertisers," Wales goes on.

In 2004, he started a for-profit company called Wikia, a community and search engine for wikis. He said that company is valued at US$70 million.

So remember digital-sharecroppers - it's all about people, it's all
about connections, it's all about community - and
selling them to advertisers to make a buck (or more than 70
million bucks, supposedly, on paper).

The Problem With Wikia Search

I'm not worthy:

For those who can't see the image, my
Wikia Search Follies blog post is the second result for a Wikia Search for [Jimmy Wales]. The first result is currently an article from The Register,
"Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia" (n.b., though that makes for an
ironic story, I suspect it really didn't happen that way).

In Wikipedia, functionally, articles are effectively controlled by a
small clique (forget all that blather about whizzing crowds, it's
nonsense). Wikia Search hasn't figured out how to do that for search
results. Frankly, I'm surprised the results for a search for [Jimmy
Wales] are relatively inoffensive. But then, the net results are
basically an approval-voting system, which favors scandal over pure
trolling. So there's a lesson there - they may end up not making a
search engine, but a selection game seeded by (bad) search engine results.

* Are some domains seen as "trusted" by Google, so that any page
within them gains some of that trust in ranking mechanisms.

* If so, is this trust transmitted to subdomains of a domain?

I think the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the
second is no. But I'd like Google to give us an on-the-record
answer. It would help with the debunking.

I too suspect the answers are "yes" and "no" respectively. The
poster-child for the "yes" answer to the first is Wikipedia, though
other superlinked sites like Amazon or IMDB are evidence also. However,
I could be convinced this is just a practical effect of trust flowing
across pages.

The second question is trickier. It's something where the answer to it
is not necessarily to the question which should be asked.
That is, I can well imagine Matt Cutts hypothetically saying something like
"No, knol.google.com is treated in the code exactly the same if were
plain old knol.com - it has no ranking advantage from google.com".
And that might be the absolute literal truth. However,
for example, knol.google.com
received at least one great link at launch from the
front
page of scholar.google.com (cached - it's gone from the current version).
So, then, any site which got a front page link from a site as trusted
and highly ranked as scholar.google.com would be treated the
same. Matt Cutts again: "We try to rank all our content on a level
playing field." (I miss vocal inflection - please try to read the
quotation as relayed with a very dry tone).

Danny Sullivan also said:

I'm saying that knol.google.com seemed to have, when I wrote this,
quickly gained enough authority ON ITS OWN that pages within it did
better -- that a page I never mentioned, which seemed to have
practically no links pointing it -- shot to 28 out of 755,000
pages. Sorry, that's just not something I think you'd see happen on
most brand new sites. And again, not because Google did anything to
favor itself. Just because the Knol site rapidly gained authority.

The problem is the words "on its own" well, they remind me of
bloggers who leaped to the A-list due to being media quasi-celebrities
or wealthy, and pontificate how it's a level playing field - meaning,
anyone who is rich or famous could do the same thing (again, that's
"democracy", web 2.0 style!). In essence, knol had a very (link)rich and
(media)famous "parentage", so pages on it ranked - and will rank - accordingly.

Wikia Search "Evolution" add-on Wikia self-promotion

I noticed an interesting little item in the release of
Wikia Search's "Evolution" browser add-on (it's
designed to hand-scrape Google and Yahoo results, but others, with
much greater audience, have already chewed that over - this post is
value added).
The owner data is:

Wikia Search Evolution 0.1.0
by Wikia Inc (Ashish Datta)

As I write this, the addon has three "reviews" and a rating of five stars (out
of five). The third so-called "review" is by Jimmy Wales
(only four stars :-)), and is really a plug. But this isn't even about that
obvious conflict-of-interest minor hype. No, what's the first review?

Wikia and "GamePro" Advertising Deal

GamePro Media will exclusively handle ad sales for the gaming section
of Wikia, the for-profit Web hosting service started by Wikipedia
co-founder Jimmy Wales, under a new marketing partnership announced today.

GamePro will serve display ads across the approximately 500,000 pages
of game-related content on Wikia covering a wide range of enthusiast
topics from the complex fantasy game "World of Warcraft" to Club
Penguin. Wikia's game-related inventory accounts for more than 300
million ad impressions a month.

With the upcoming relaunch of GamePro.com on Aug. 12, the company also
plans to feature Wikia Gaming content on the revamped home page. ...
At the same time, GamePro will also allow Wikia authors to grab
content from the site including game screenshots, expert reviews and
video available to use within their own wikis, Huseby said

Let's see if I've got this straight. You work for free, and a
for-profit magazine might use your material without paying you. In
return, they'll let you use their promotional material for what
the magazine sells, i.e. be an unpaid marketer. But remember,
folks, it's all about the "community"!